Burning the Qur’an in Sweden angers Turkey and threatens NATO’s membership path

Sweden, Finland and Turkey last year signed a trilateral agreement dedicated to overcoming their differences and opposition to NATO membership.

But Sweden’s Kristersson said earlier this month that Stockholm could not meet all of Turkey’s demands, which include the extradition of Kurdish journalists living in Sweden, a request that was rejected by the country’s supreme court.

“Turkey maintains that we did what we said we would do, but they also say they want things that we cannot or do not want to give them,” Kristerson said at the January 8 conference.

However, he expressed confidence that Turkey would agree to his country’s NATO request. Hungary, whose populist leader Viktor Orban has friendly relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, is the only other country besides Turkey that has not yet agreed to the offer.

Turkey analysts say the latest angry statements from Ankara have more to do with the country’s upcoming elections on May 14 and gaining leverage from other NATO allies, particularly the United States, than anything else.

George Dyson, a senior analyst at the consulting firm Control Risks, said the burning of the Quran and the Kurdish video of Erdogan’s effigy “make it difficult to get past the impasse” between Turkey and Sweden.

“But,” the deadlock was already there, he told CNBC. And it doesn’t really have much to do with Sweden, and more to do with Turkey trying to squeeze as much as it can of any leverage over its allies. . “

“It is more about US-Turkish relations,” he added. “Turkey feels the United States is a good friend when they need it but not when Turkey needs it…or at least that’s the rhetoric.”

Timothy Ash, senior emerging markets analyst at BlueBay Asset Management, believes that Turkey is doing serious damage to its Western alliances and that NATO may come to a pivotal choice between Turkey and the Nordic countries.

“Access [the] Are you suggesting that NATO allies will have to decide between Turkey and Finland/Sweden? “I understand the election calculus by Erdoğan, but in the end this will damage longstanding relations with key allies,” Ash said via Twitter.

Meanwhile, UK-based security and terrorism analyst Kyle Orton wrote in a blog post that “Turkey has been holding [Sweden’s] Application NATO hostage claims about [Kurdish militant group] Kurdistan workers’ party. With the burning of the Qur’an in Stockholm yesterday, he wrote, “Ankara is cynically trying to build up pressure by blatant interference in Sweden’s internal affairs.”

There is also some speculation that the United States will use the promise of its F16 jets — an arms sale Ankara has long wanted — to coerce Turkey into doing so. Some members of Congress have expressed their opposition to the sale because of Turkey’s position on the new applicants for NATO.

Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin recently said that Sweden has eight to ten weeks to make the changes that Ankara is calling for, as the Turkish parliament may go into recess before the elections in May. Sweden says it needs another six months to make these changes.

But whatever timeline Sweden follows, the Turkish leadership is likely to stick a hard line until the election, knowing that anti-Western rhetoric and a strong nationalist stance tend to do well with voters.

“Bottom line, I suspect a lot will happen before the elections in Turkey,” Dyson said.